Before NTP there were Time and Daytime In building an NTP time demo on old Macs for VCF Midwest, I came across RFC 867 and RFC 868, for the ‘Daytime’ and ‘Time’ Protocols, respectively. My first exposure to any form of network time was when I upgraded from a used PowerBook 180c to my first ’new’ computer, a
Building a mini Homelab that fits in my carry-on I’m traveling to Chicago for VCF Midwest next month. I’ll be demoing NTP time history on vintage Macs, with my own GPS-derived NTP service hosted on an Xserve G5, synced via NTP or a strange AppleTalk timing extension from the 1990s. So I built a little ‘portable homelab’ (pictured above) that
How big are factorials
Debugging Ubiquitis 5G Backup on ATT For a mobile ‘mini homelab’ project I’m working on, I wanted to use 5G Internet as a primary ‘on-to-go’ connection, but still have the ability to plug in another Internet connection when I put the mobile rack I’m building in a fixed location. I’ll have more on that project soon, but
Anthropics LLM watermarking So yeah, Anthropic has announced that it’s now watermarking the outputs of Claude, using a scheme based on Google’s SynthID, which is in turn based on the Gumbel Softmax scheme that I proposed at OpenAI back in 2022—as far as I know, the first LLM watermarking proposal, though far from
Concurrent Servers Part 8 - Go
Better than gold What’s about the only thing more badass than a 17-year-old winning a gold medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI)? That 17-year-old intentionally forfeiting his gold medal by wearing an Israeli flag while the medal was announced, defying the IOI’s boycott of Israel (for background on this boycott, see
Getting the Steam Deck LCD working on a Raspberry Pi The BOE TV070WXM-TV0 LCD used in the original Steam Deck can be had for around $30. It’s a serviceable 7" touchscreen with 400 nits of brightness and a resolution of 1280x800 (for a sharp 216 ppi). The specs are a lot nicer than the Pi 7" Touch Display, which costs twice
Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
Hands-on with Raspberry Pis CM5 Programming Jig In the before-times, when Raspberry Pi CM5s were (relatively) affordable, I built a number of Pi clusters (example), and one of the most annoying parts of the build was flashing Raspberry Pi OS to all the Pis. One, two, or even three Pis isn’t a big deal, but once you hit